Guessing game
Wanna play? Let’s start with two riddles:
1. What do home-office contracts, elevators, online-banking, cars, teleshopping and remote-controls have in common?
Yeah, you’ve guessed it: these technologies or technology-driven routines, like many others, were designed to make your life easier by lessening the drudgery or (seeming) discomfort linked to (pre-)industrial life.
But even without being a certified conspiracy theorist, you may begin to wonder about their unintended side effects as you painfully emerge from your office chair or your couch. What if they were designed to keep you immobile?
2. And what is the common denominator of healthy, active and curious elderlies?
OK, that was easy: the answer is contained in the question. They are active: they move! When you don’t find them weeding the garden, they are cycling along the river, babysitting a wild pack of kids, taking that new salsa class or off to the Lake District on a walking holiday…
The Industrial Revolution’s second “gift”
Recently, we examined the extraordinarily fast and deleterious effects of glucose (aka sugar and starches) on the Western diet, highlighting it as a very recent phenomenon in the history of mankind.
Our postmodern “freeze-culture” shares a similar time frame. Like glucose, immobilisation has been slowly but surely creeping its way into Western culture for the past couple of centuries. And now, considering the increasing burdens of obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease and all manner of joint and muscle pain issues worldwide, non-Western cultures seem to have also been contaminated.
Rediscovering the Blue Zone “moves”
When discussing the so-called Blue Zone cultures, the focus is often on diet and, occasionally, on community or spirituality. These aspects are no doubt crucial, but a particularly striking feature of all Blue Zone communities is that their elderlies never seem to put their feet up.
However, chances are you will not find them running triathlons, pumping iron or experimenting with the latest HIIT protocol. Instead, they move naturally. As aptly put by a roundtable on Population Health Improvement:
“The world's longest-lived people do not 'exercise'. In blue zones, Buettner's team observed that people were nudged into moving about every 20 minutes. For example, they were gardening, they kneaded their own bread, and they used hand-operated tools; their houses were not full of conveniences. When they did go out (e.g., to school, work, a friend's house, a restaurant, or to socialize), it was almost always on foot.”
The roundtable goes on to conclude that “Movement is engineered into their daily lives.” But in contrast with urban dwellers, the “engineering” of movement into everyday Blue Zone life seems to occur unconsciously. Indeed, movement is simply a by-product of a lifestyle that is not obsessed with comfort and convenience.
Witness for instance the stamina of Sardinia’s Blue Zone shepherds, walking uphill for miles and effortlessly rebuilding heavy stones walls. Dan Buettner describes his encounter with shepherd Tonino, a particularly sprightly 75-year-old role-model: “It was 9:45 a.m. on a cool November morning. Tonino had been up since 4 and had already pastured his sheep, cut wood, trimmed olive trees, fed his cows, and eviscerated this 18-month-old cow that was now hanging spread-eagle from the rafters.”
“Natural” movement in the city
So, what are we suggesting? Moving to an alpine “refuge” in the Swiss mountains, or purchasing an “hacienda” in the South of Spain?
While this will certainly provide you with (a lot) more natural movement in your everyday life, it will probably prove unfeasible for most individuals. So, we are not recommending you cancel your gym subscription, shelve your half-marathon plans or drop out of your Pilates classes. But even if your lifestyle is mostly urban and/or corporate, there are many routines you can incorporate on a daily basis that will provide at least some measure of “natural” movement.
Depending on your environment and your personal circumstances, you could set yourself small challenges along the lines of:
- Walking or cycling to work,
- Shunning elevators and escalators for the good old stairs,
- Walking to the shops and back, as well as carrying your own shopping,
- Investing in a standing desk or desk implement for a more dynamic posture
- Planting a vegetable/flower garden or joining a community garden
- Planning active DIY weekend projects instead of melting on the couch with a beer
- Incorporating more hikes, brisk walks or swimming into your leisure,
- And perhaps even occasionally running to catch the bus…
Even just implementing two or three of these measures may already make a difference in your overall well-being and, in turn, influence your longevity. So why don’t you test how elating it can feel to no longer wheeze your way up to the fifth floor or to effortlessly cycle to work?
From comfy convenience to true quality of life?
Because that’s the problem with comfort and convenience: the energy that they seem to save you is literally the energy that could save you from the ills of a sedentary lifestyle.
And as countless sociologists, anthropologists or historians of technology will tell you, this particularly perverse paradox is just one of the unintended side effects entailed in relying too heavily on technology and its processes.
So, we challenge you to (at least occasionally) break the cycle of techno-dependence – at least for the sake of your health! Yes, weeding a garden or cycling through the city may initially feel like hard work, but the satisfaction you will ultimately derive from these activities will extend from your physical to your mental and emotional health, not to mention your longevity!
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Sources and further reading
Frank W. Booth, Christian K. Roberts, John P. Thyfault, Gregory N. Ruegsegger, and Ryan G. Toedebusch, "Role of Inactivity in Chronic Diseases: Evolutionary Insight and Pathophysiological Mechanisms", Physiological Reviews 2017 97:4,1351-1402. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00019.2016. Online: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physrev.00019.2016
Freese J, Klement RJ, Ruiz-Núñez B, Schwarz S, Lötzerich H. "The sedentary (r)evolution:Have we lost our metabolic flexibility?" F1000Res. 2017 Oct 2;6:1787. doi:10.12688/f1000research.12724.2. Online: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5710317/
J. Ildefonzo Arocha Rodulfo, "Sedentarismo, la enfermedad del siglo xxi", Clínica eInvestigación en Arteriosclerosis, Volume 31, Issue 5, 2019, Pages 233-240. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arteri.2019.04.004.Online (in English): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0214916819300543
Jérémy Raffin, Philipe de Souto Barreto, Anne Pavy Le Traon, Bruno Vellas, Mylène Aubertin-Leheudre, Yves Rolland, “Sedentary behavior and the biological hallmarks of aging”, Ageing Research Reviews, Volume 83, 2023, 101807. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arr.2022.101807.Online: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568163722002495
Roundtable on Population Health Improvement; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice; Institute of Medicine. Business Engagement in Building Healthy Communities: Workshop Summary. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2015 May 8. 2, Lessons from the Blue Zones®. Online: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK298903/
Buettner, Dan. The Blue Zone: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest. Washington: National Geographic Books, 2008, p. 42.
Schwartz-Cowan, Ruth. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books. 1983.
Illustrations
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Gül Işık /pexels
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Andrea Piacquadio / pexels
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